- This topic is empty.
-
Posts
-
Paysite Power: Are You Ready to Invest in a Paysite? is an article on XBiz and is really worth reading if you’re thinking about starting up a paysite, or already have one and are struggling to make it successful.
Here’s an excerpt:
Does anyone want it? What’s your competition? If you spend an hour on Google and a few big tubes and see lots of your type of content all over the place for free, you may want to rethink things or at the bare minimum, come up with a unique marketing spin. Water companies do this by saying their water is “purified” or “mountain spring” knowing most consumers won’t do their research and realize this means little and is just creative sales fluff.Before you dump tens of thousands into something, unless you’re 100% positive there’s a market for it, consider promoting a site in your niche as an affiliate. If you can’t make sales for someone else’s site, chances are slim that you’ll be able to do it for your own site either.
The same goes for granular niche/sub-niche content. Make sure enough people are into whatever you’re selling that even with totally dominating your market, you can make more than a trickle of sales each month.
It was written by AJ Hall …a 15-year adult industry veteran and CEO of Elevated X Inc., a provider of popular adult site CMS software. Hall has spoken at industry trade shows and written for several trade publications. Elevated X software powers more than 2,000 leading adult sites, has been nominated for more than a dozen industry awards and won the 2012, 2014 and 2015 XBIZ Award for Software Company of the Year.
If you are about to invest in paysite – first thing consider VR.
It’s going to be very popular I think but VR equipment might be a rather high expense for someone just starting out.
If the concept was right and if I knew the person behind it very well, then yes I would for sure invest. Running a paysite is a lot of hard work though and needs to be someone you can trust and know will be able to cope with it long term. So many new sites start up and just fizzle out after a few months, which is rather mad considering the startup costs involved. You have to be very committed to make it work.
i don’t think money is always the problem in the case of many failed paysites. it’s not understanding what members want, how to present it, what video formats/sizes qualities to use, how to find the info you need – which is often the biggest problem. i’ve talked to guys who just gave up after trying and failing to make people either want to join or want to retain at their sites.
a lot of abandoned paysites i review (including one i’m working on right now) never had a chance because of the way they offered their videos, which makes the site look huge when you log in, only members will discover after maybe 10 minutes that the site has less than 40 videos set up to look like hundreds. they also decided not to offer MP4s but to continue with only WMVs. sometimes incredibly poor descriptions – written by people who aren’t fluent in english and try to sound “gay” – can give an instant feeling of a lower quality site and can also be offensive to some. then there are sites that have full page ads when members log in right after paying – a great way to be sure everyone cancels before they hit the actual member area.
and then there are the zillions of paysites with inaccurate claims. some are decent sites, but if you get guys to join who are looking for interracial (as an example), and most of the action is solo, you’re going to get the wrong members to join the site – the ones who aren’t looking for what you have to offer. it would have been better to market your site as a solo black site with some interracial on the side. you can plug in almost any niche, too – i’ve seen big cock sites with guys who are mostly small to average, sites offering homemade amateur videos that offer nothing but studio-produced porn, spanking sites where there’s only 30 seconds of half-hearted spanking and lots of fucking.
then it’s hard to know who to find when you DO need help. most people who start paysites don’t seem to want to spend weeks or months on research, so they hire an expert. there’s a guy who i will not name, but he used to do what i used to do – we both helped paysite owners figure out what wasn’t working. he charged $25,000 up front. every site i saw that he worked with had clips but no full scenes – even though stats could have shown those owners before he came on board that 90% of downloads were full scenes at the time. he felt that people preferred fast downloads because he had no idea what was happening with paysites, when the first thing i did usually was check stats to see where members were going in the member area and how many downloads of what were happening. another guy, who was really nice but was a designer, not a paysite expert, charged a guy i was working with $700 to make his member area retain better. he did all sorts of things, completely revamped the member area, requiring us to learn to do all sorts of things differently, but didn’t cause one more member to retain, and it was easy to see why – there wasn’t enough content, the videos had scanlines – not sure if it was the guy who encoded it or the original videos – and everything was small and poorly presented.
oops! this went long… i could keep going, but i’m sure no one has the time to read my eternal post
i was remembering after reading this thread and writing that post about a straight site i worked with. it was a handjob site, and the owner paid me to watch every video and choose the best pic from each one plus i think it was thee other pics to be small thumbs on the side of the best pic on the tour. there were 32 videos, and each were about 80% blowjobs with some kissing and fondling, and fucking in some of them; there was maybe 1 to 3 minutes of actual handjob in each scene. i chose handjob pics to be the tour’s big pics, and the site sold well and retained not at all. no surprise to me, as while more guys want sucking and fucking, the ones joining a handjob site are looking for handjobs. and btw, the content was beautifully lit and shot, the performers were attractive, the videos were offered in a good selection including high quality streaming, HD and mobile downloads.
i told the site owner i was concerned about the content not matching the site niche, and maybe he’d do better to either come up with a theme that more closely matched the action or maybe he could at least shoot the new stuff so there was a focus on handjobs. he told me most surfers weren’t actually looking for handjobs and went on about this at me for a while. i shrugged and did what he paid me to do. his members weren’t impressed, and a year later he actually pulled the site down. and why did he start a handjob site? because a few webmasters told him it sold and retained well, but he let his personal preferences get in the way.
which reminds me of a “granny” site at a program where most of the women were well put-together, sexy and between their late twenties and maybe mid-thirties. although the site name and domain had “granny” in it, it had no grannies at all, and actually said on the tour not to worry, it had no dried up old hags or white-haired women. the program rep told me that no one wanted to see older women. at the time, we had a site called grandma’s hairy pussy – it was not a paysite, but made us plenty of sales from sites that had actual women over 40 and through their early 60s. go figure!
and why did he start a handjob site? because a few webmasters told him it sold and retained well, but he let his personal preferences get in the way.
And as reviewers and copy writers we see that soooo often. And it’s why when we’re asked “what kind of site sells” we respond with “sell what turns you on personally”. Most don’t get that they really need to understand a niche when wanting to do a paysite… or a blog for that matter. The more you are in tune with what attracts people to a specific niche category, the better you are at “talking the talk” and producing a product that gets the wallet out.
“as while more guys want sucking and fucking, the ones joining a handjob site are looking for handjobs.”
This is one of the biggest problems I see a lot of these days, sites straying from their original concept. Sometimes it works, if you can find a way to properly monitor what people are signing up for rather than what people are saying they want, but I think in most instances it’s not done properly and, as you say, it’s a personal decision and probably based on assumptions or the opinions of a minority, rather than actual statistics.
I saw a good example of this with a client a few months ago when they added a trans scene to their site. The outrage among the paying members was palpable, threatening, even abusive. But, the stats showed that this scene brought in plenty of new members. The real question here is whether that was an overall benefit to the site when compared to the loss from members leaving. I trust that they ran the numbers and it all stacked up.
So, while the members might have railed against it, it probably made them more money than it lost. But is that sustainable in the longer term? That’s a real risk for such a dramatic change of theme.
I think this also applies to specific models too. We have a couple of great performers we like to promote on a couple of our sites and they earn us money, but they both left the business last year and haven’t been seen since. I’m quite sure both of those guys would still be making videos if invited, so I can only assume they’re just not being asked. This makes me wonder whether the sites they appeared for are actively checking the stats and running the numbers to see how popular and profitable these performers are.
I also think that when a change is made a site owner often forgets to take into account how their content has been marketed for several years. For instance, if a site like Chaos Men has been promoted for the Glory Hole videos or Edge scenes for the last five years and they suddenly stop making those, all that traffic from those existing affiliates using that content becomes a hell of a lot less valuable. Guys are clicking through to see more of what they just enjoyed on a blog, but they can see it’s no longer being done…
Heya all,
I run an australian site ( AussieAss.com & AussiePOV.com ) and I just had a read through what you all have said and it really made me think..!! I really like the point that site owners/producers may be filming what they want to see and not catering to their market.
Do you have any tips on ways to get better members feedback to help aid with this? Do other sites use questionaires or just members clicks statistics or is there better ways?
Also, what do members want in terms of members area features and as basschick mentioned, video formats?
I have a Paysite CMS powered by Modelcentro. Its Revshare i pay 25 of my earnings are given to MC.
The engine, maintainance and suppoet are awesome. The buissness model is the opsite, the MC team musst help you or they wont make any money
Clicking on my avatar will send you to the ModelCentro.com registration.
For every earning paysite owner i will get a bonus from modelcentro equal to 10% of your winnings.
Its a bonus coming out of MC pokets your earnings are not affected
